well i'm tom are in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture yesterday voters in venezuela showed up to the polls in droves and real like the chavez and his socialist revolution so what should we really be so quick to dismiss chavez and his socialism experiment and it's helped to reduce extreme poverty in venezuela by seventy percent also all across america today children had the day off from school to honor christopher columbus the great explorer who found america for europeans

but lost in all the schoolroom textbooks is the real story behind columbus and let's just say he really doesn't deserve a holiday and what happens when your republican governor try to privatized just about every aspect of the state government into making sewage treatment workers go on strike causing fears of a giant stinking mess in your state's largest city. you need to know this viva la revolution in venezuela on sunday voters took to the polls and elected chavez to serve a third term as president of venezuela that's continuing the socialist revolution chavez started only fourteen years ago for at least another six years chavez has been a pariah among western governments ever since he took control of his nation and nationalized oil and other major industries in that country and redistributed wealth down to the

poor and working class so far it's been a success story in venezuela under chavez as watch poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty reduced by seventy percent college enrollment has doubled public pensions so quadrupled and a new government housing program has built a quarter. a million new homes across venezuela access to healthcare and education of also risen considerably in two different parts of the world were seen drastically different economic approaches in debt ridden europe with the exception of france and scandinavia technocrats and banks are shoving austerity down the throats of working people cutting back on social services privatizing big chunks of the commons in south america opposing economic philosophies progressive you cannot mix philosophies are seen enormous success their version of socialism following his victory on sunday night chavez addresses addressed his supporters of the presidential palace where he said this has been the perfect a democratic battle that is well it will continue along the path of democratic and

bowl ovarian socialism of the twenty first century keyword there is democratic leading up to the election many in the united states speculated that chavez was headed for defeat or that he would reveal action to ensure his victory in a reality of that as well as one of the better democracies in the world of not the best jimmy carter applauded but as well as elections saying of the ninety two elections that we've monitored i would say that the election process in venezuela is the best in the world unlike the united states venezuela boasts of voter turnout in the eighty percent range venezuela doesn't trust corporate voting machines to determine the winner of their elections so they have paper trails that are cross-reference with the machines results and unlike in the united states were republicans are trying to keep people from voting polling places were kept open late to accommodate massive turnout so on a day like today when we hear from our news media that they'll no longer conduct exit polling in one thousand states and when right wing organizations are suing

states to have more voters kicked off the rolls can we really be making judgments on venezuelan democracy maybe we should be taking notes. joining me now is mark weisbrot co-director of the center for economic policy and research marc welcome back thanks tom great to be here great to have you with us chavez wins who else wins is a virtue of the selection well the south american governments that are allied with him brazil argentina. ecuador believe you were go are all of them are watching closely and they're very happy as well you know in the united states chavez is presented as though he's kind of from mars but really what you saw and read as well is very similar to what happened in all those other countries and they all keep getting reelected he's not the only one you know lou was reelected in brazil and then his successor dilma. you had rafael correa of ecuador reelected they believe you are really like that so everyone gets really because they've really delivered something on their promise and they're actually helping the people

a shock is it that in those countries they have laws that prevent billionaires from buying elections or only in you know air dropping. tons of ads in the media well you know it's interesting because the all those governments had the media against all every one of those candidates every one of those governments some worse than others but all of them argentina brazil so it's just they delivered so completely that the people didn't believe the b.s. coming at them from the media yeah i mean you also have you know this long period these elections started in ninety eight with venezuela and then were followed he was followed by the other ones but they had this long period of economic failure. kind of like ours is a little different in the sense that the economy hardly grew at all whereas ours was more redistribution thing but so they had twenty years of the worst economic failure in over a century then they started to elect these left governments and then once they got them and they saw the difference it was very hard to get rid of them could it be that the reason that the united states in the in the western world in the more

developed northern hemisphere countries that the united states is at the least growing. g.d.p. and has been for three years two and a half years and change and the european countries that are embracing austerity are collapsing could it be that those european countries are doing what they were doing in south america twenty years ago and we're doing a really tiny version of what chavez is doing in venezuela well it is. a what you see in europe is very similar to what it was in south america for those twenty years of failure you had a lot of. instances where governments cut spending in a time of recession or tight monetary policy and a recession and so you have you have the european central bank and the i.m.f. are involved in a project in europe to dismantle the welfare state that is a very that is very similar to what the voters have rejected in country after country in south america and it's what you know with who is the right wing dictator

took over chile. pinochet thank you and you know he came in he brought the chicago boys with him and said you know ok we're going to try this experiment they privatized those security they they nuked everything and pushed down the tubes you know that was also that was part of that terrible economic failure and eighty's and now i read a piece over the weekend i think it was maybe last friday in the financial times about how there is actually a schism in south america between the moderate liberals. like in brazil and the. ball of air in or the castro east is specifically chavez but largely chavez. is that just you know hype coming out of the corporate media yes i would say so it comes mostly from the state department in the the media picks it up basically says the bush administration the state department has had a strategy i mean they oppose all of these left governments they don't like brazil either so it's a brazilian government either but they can't really say that i mean you see that in

the washington times you know in the right the far right will say it but the state department has decided to focus on job isn't trying to isolate him. and then so the media picks up on this in then they say you know bolivia and ecuador sometimes even include argentina the washington post but good left bad left kind of thing but that's not the way these governments see it at all i mean you have lula said before this election he was just a few weeks ago even as well he said a victory for venice for java's in this election is a victory for all of latin america and that is how did i get reported here if it did i didn't know but it's on the web you can find it i put it in my columns and to read more you know they don't the press never really reports how close brazil and argentina are they're closer to venezuela than even bolivia and ecuador remarkable we have some lessons to learn i mean just very pragmatic what works what doesn't work we're seeing the laboratory all around the mark thank you so much for being

with us tonight thank you took up the great work thanks you did some great work right. now on to the election front in the united states our news media is dropping the ball on election night associated press and t.v. news organizations announce they're cutting back on exit polling us election and only conducting polls and thirty one states this year instead of all fifty states like they have in previous years so what impact might this have on the legitimacy of our election for more on this i'm joined by jonathan simon co-founder and director of the election defense alliance jonathan welcome. thank you tom so the a.p. and news organizations are dropping exit polls in nineteen states to save money or perhaps to increase profits i guess you could say their way shouldn't this shouldn't have been to do exit polls simply be the price of admission if you're going to call yourself a news agency. well first of all to clarify these are nineteen states that are

regarded as noncompetitive when it comes presidential election and one or two have competitive senate races but for the most part they're states that are solid red solid blue so their explanation is well you don't really need exit polls there who cares and in fact exit polls in general have been largely discredited as a check mechanism on the alluded to the vote counts anymore and prosecute him softly weren't you came out and said you know our polls are for academic analysis purposes only and anybody who wants to use in that subject mechanism is basically a rope on the top and that was not saying that before two thousand i mean up of from from the one nine hundred seventy s. one nine hundred sixty s. actually through the nineteenth through through the one thousand nine hundred eleven exit polls in the united states virtually always comported typically within a tenth of a point with a voter of calm that they only started going nuts after the ninety eight election and after two thousand and two with the help america vote act we got all these these voting machines that. yes i'm glad you said that one when computers came in

and took over elections all of a sudden exit polls were off because they were oversampling democrats or something to that that in fact the key there is that the votes have always been considered by the mainstream media and also surprisingly by a good deal of the progressive media and all the pundits in this nation of ours the vote counts of been considered gospel this is where we've been this is fact this is reality anything that doesn't comport with them is there for. some reason off or. or mistaken or rig as karl rove is now saying of the various pre-election polls this year and so you know you have to quote you have to scratch your head and say we'll on what basis do we take these vote counts as gospel they're basically emerging from a handful of corporations with extremely strong partisan ties to the right wing they're completely concealed their own computers for which there is absolutely no

public right of inspection you the memory cards our code the actual ballots that wind up in op scans that seem to give people a lot of comfort because they've actually voted on a paper ballot and ninety nine point nine percent of the time those ballots go to the shredder without ever seeing the light of day so you have basically one hundred percent faith based elections throughout the vast majority of this country no basis rational basis for trusting those vote counts and anything that we use as baselines pre-election polls exit polls hand counts whatever we use are always either ignored or ridicule so we produce forensic and statistical evidence that elections have been rigged it's basically just ignored or waved off by by the collective media amazing well hopefully they will start paying attention to what you guys are have having a say jonathan simon thank you so much for being with us tonight. better say one more thing if it's very quick i'm going to say that if you're going to govern the

hundred percent in the interests of the one percent you've got to pull out all the stops and pull every string and some of that is just thirty politics of voter suppression big money citizens united i got if you're actually jonathan it is i really are out of time now so thank you very much for being with us we'll be right to you. here is mitt romney trying to fit. the name of that thing that many americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about you sir are a fool you know what kind of terrorist cells in your neighborhood want to give us a defeat terrorism a limp all the christian point you. can secure the borders because. you know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about because

they're profit driven industry that sells us sensationalistic garbage because that breaking news i'm happy martin and we're going to break that. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

of the. in screwed news more trouble in michigan last week unionized workers with the detroit water and sewerage department went on strike to find a court order that prohibited such action they were protesting a new contract signed by the city of detroit the corporation known as a inc created a five year seventy million dollars contract e.-m. a would administer the city's water and sewage services in other words the contract would privatized detroit's water supply now and that the contract allows him

a to eliminate as much as eighty percent of the current unionized workers that the water and sewage department currently employs more than thirty workers actively participated in the strike and face losing their jobs over it but in a deal struck last friday between management workers' strike was called off in return for letting thirty six workers who are a threat would term a nation keep their jobs as far as the fate of the city's water plant workers in the long run that's still up in the year now this is the same state republican governor rick snyder passed his financial managers law giving him the power to take over financially strapped cities and appoint a lackey to fire all the elected officials instead of run the city in a similar fashion to that of billionaire with mitt romney over at bain so might this law have anything to do with the action we're seen at detroit's water and sewage plant joining me now is reverend de alexander bull president of the rainbow chapter of that if you see the detroit chapter of rainbow push and president park michigan the end of rubber bullets welcome back to the program. thank you for

having me today thanks for joining us the strike is over but is this issue resolved . the strike is over but the issue is not resolved. the war has just oh and we celebrate that victory but we must remain vigilant remember now workers were striking because this is actually. the result case that the union had no access to the legal proceedings and so decisions were being made about the. workers cox without the lawyers and the union workers being able to negotiate and present their case as a part of the leave you proceedings if you want when the strike groat the back of corporate power was the ability now for the union and the workers to parties

going forward and we hope that in those proceedings the workers' rights will be protected what what role does governor snyder's financial managers law has quite a little dictator on what i decide that there's a financial problem in a city or municipality does that play in the us. i think i think again what we're seeing is we're seeing a trend of privatisation emergency man. and is just coming back in unions this is this is obviously another case of union busting we're seeing it in the water department we're singing with the police department we see. it with the founders unit we're seeing it with the teachers this is just one more case of collective bargaining rights being challenged remember now eighty one per. percent of the work to be fired or terminated and the work rebuild workforce was then going to be privatized and so emergency management. it now has michigan where

workers private and public who want to unionize or are unionized who find themselves under attack. well you know privatizing it seems that this may even go beyond just busting the unions. because privatizing provides an opportunity for rick snyder to hand off something of a tremendous value you know the land was taken by eminent domain that the water processing plants were built with with you know pretty current in you know inflated dollars there's there's an enormous wealth there are enormous value there that he's basically handing off to for profit corporations and saying hey make some bucks here bring in people make a taco bell wages you know. him by the way contribute a little my campaign or or my being away to senator. you know what i would hope that you were being too soon. but in fact you are so precise you

get the nail on the this is just about privatization and busting unions and firing eighty. one percent of the work is also about assets i mean as you said bailout stands in the balance the water plant stands in the balance transportation. this is in the city of detroit but we've seen this in benton harbor where parks have been given to private developers we've seen this in flint again with genesee towers. so to a dollar public land given to private developers and so yes this case of the water plant eighty one percent of the work is being fired. also sets the stage for it and asked it to be taken from the city and liquidated. and it was some private company so you're not being too cynical we stand vigilantly against emergency management because this is a big. this is and this is also about cities that are cash poor but as it

rich reverend mohler so also thank you again for joining us. tom thank you so much. quick what does the word. tell you know if you know most americans are unfamiliar with the name of the caribbean tribe the believe that their island was the earliest part of creation and therefore the sun in the moon every day rose up out of a cave on its northernmost coast on the other hand most americans know today is columbus day at least in forty seven states although hawaii has renamed it discoverers day after the original polynesians who populated that island thousands of years ago south dakota calls it native american day and alaska just ignores it like become a do everything but what we're really celebrating today is tyee no genocide

day the day when christopher columbus began to wipe out an entire indigenous population in a way that would even make pol pot blush and fourteen ninety two columbus was on a manic con for goal when he set sail and eventually landed on a small island off the coast of north and south america and island today named this . which is split between the nations of haiti and the dominican republic as columbus wrote in a letter to the king and queen of spain gold is most excellent gold constitutes treasure and he who has it does all the once in the world and can even live souls up to paradise but when he landed in what he called the new world there wasn't much gold to be found but he did find something he thought was just as good as gold people who in columbus's mind would make great slaves so he wrote to the spanish monarchs they are well built with good bodies and handsome features they do not bear arms you do not know them for i showed them a sword and they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance they have

no iron their spears are made of cane they would make fine servants with fifty men we can subject them all and make them do what ever we want and here there are so many of these slaves although they are living things they are as good as gold. what columbus did to the island of the tragedy he brought to the native population there has been largely erased by time and replaced by a glorified story of a bold explorer explorer who set out to change the planet in reality though as a result of what we've learned from writings by christopher columbus is own men he raped pillaged enslaved and slaughtered people just to get rich not exactly as have a guy worthy of a main street parade want to columbus crew man the golfs sway no quinones he described the scene when columbus first arrived in hispaniola for the second time and thousands of tiny nose or what referred to as indians came out to greet the

ships when a road when our caravels were to leave for spain we gathered one thousand six hundred male and female persons of these indians for those who remained we let it be known to the spaniards in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so to the amount desired which was done when i went on to write that he took his own sex slave a beautiful teenage girl who in his words quote resisted with all her strength quote and quote leaving him no other choice but to quote thrasher mercilessly and rape her and quote and when columbus his men did good work columbus routinely presented them with their very own sex slaves but that was just the beginning columbus eventually started up a global sex child sex slave trade exporting indians all around the world as he bragged to a friend in a letter written in fifteen hundred one hundred castellanos a spanish coin are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking

for girls those from nine to ten years old are now in demand. eventually under columbus's orders life for the tiny on their homeland of spending became so bad that they resorted to mass suicide as the spanish miss missionary cordoba noted in fifteen seventeen twenty five years after columbus arrived as a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured the indians choose and have chosen suicide occasionally one hundred have committed mass suicide the women exhausted by labor have shunned conception and childbirth many one pregnant have taken something to abort and have aborted others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery by the time cordoba wrote those words the indigenous population on hispaniola had plummeted from roughly three million people before columbus arrived to only twelve thousand and twenty five years later a few decades after that one was left on the island and entire culture and people

completely wiped off the map and largely forgotten thanks to christopher columbus happy time you know genocide day. crazy alert baring it all for the cause we all know austerity is wreaking havoc on the eurozone nations and no country knows that more than spain thanks the austerity measures in that country firefighters have had their pay slashed by a bit as a result many of these firefighters are fed up and have had enough that's where the firefighters from the me out of those fires station in our story as spain come in they decided to go all out to raise awareness of austerity measures and budget cuts by stripping down to just their ads and boots and they held up

a sign which translated read reads with so many cuts we have been left naked firefighters are hoping that their in the buff display will not only wake the spanish people up to the severity of austerity a sturdy but will also encourage politicians to abandon the austerity shift so let's hope that lawmakers in spain don't let the firefighters messes slip through the cracks and if they finally say no to austerity you know if ands or buts. coming up last week's improved job numbers were all we're not all good news especially for the african-american community with an unemployment rate of thirteen point four percent last month this new report that we continue programs like affirmative action that are helping african-americans succeed america.

if.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.